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reporTING FROM china

I’ve been the Shanghai correspondent for the Associated Press since late 2014. My focus is projects and investigations. I've been writing mostly about transnational criminal networks thriving in the shadows of China's rise, with specific attention to the opioid trade,counterfeiting and money laundering.Before coming to China, I lived and worked in Italy, Myanmar, India, Cambodia and New York. I’ve contributed to the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post and Newsweek, among others.

BEIJING (AP) — U.S. assertions that China is the top source of the synthetic opioids that have killed thousands of drug users in the U.S. and Canada are unsubstantiated, Chinese officials told The Associated Press. Both the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy point to China as North America's main source of fentanyl, related drugs and the chemicals used to make them. Such statements "lack the support of sufficient numbers of actual, confirmed cases," China's National Narcotics Control

ASHDOD, Israel (AP) — Gilbert Chikli was rolling in money, stolen from some of the world's biggest corporations. His targets: Accenture. Disney. American Express. In less than two years, he made off with at least 6.1 million euros from France alone. But he had a problem. He couldn't spend the money. A tangle of banking rules designed to stop con men like him stood between Chikli and his cash. He needed to find a weak link in the global financial system, a place to make his stolen money appear legitimate. He found it in China. "China has become a

SHANGHAI (AP) — The woman called herself Flaming Lee, an English name she picked when she was 10 years old, long before she got into the dirty business of counterfeit goods. Her job as a private investigator sometimes took her to client meetings at Dubai's seven-star Burj Al Arab hotel. Otherwise, she lived in apparent simplicity.There were few signs of the deception that shaped her life. Officially, Flaming Lee hunted counterfeiters for Swiss power technology giant ABB Asea Brown Boveri Ltd. Unofficially, she herself

MUMBAI (AP) - — Sabid Ali Sheikh stands on a prairie of trash — old onions, excrement, animal bones — slowly rotting its way back into an earth riddled with rat burrows. Sometimes the ground gives way under his feet. It is after midnight, and Sheikh is after the rats. He listens for them. He tries to catch their red eyes in the sweep of his flashlight. Some rat killers say they can smell them in the dark. Sheikh, 23, is a night rat killer, one of 44 employed by the city of Mumbai to wage its long, losing war against vermin.

MUMBAI (AP) - An Indian judge last week told the only surviving gunman from the 2008 attack on Mumbai he would be hanged from his neck until he dies. Fair punishment, most here think, for rampaging through India's financial capital with an automatic rifle and helping kill 166 people. Mohammed Ajmal Kasab — the 22-year-old Pakistani man who began the trial so cocky it was as if he'd already ceded his claim on life — began to cry. Then he asked for a glass of water. What do you do, really, when you've gotten yourself into such...

PHNOM PENH - The scavengers, a dozen men, women, and children, wait all day in the slim shade of two trees, hoping for an opportunity to grab an armful of stones from the mountain of broken rock cast off by the Chinese mining company that came to Prey Meas – literally “Forest of Gold” – two years ago. Today Prey Meas, which lies within the Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuary, is less forest than gold. Its river runs gray and great pools of rust-colored water have settled onto the parched earth.